There is little empirical research to date that looks at how the deleterious effects of social exclusion can be mitigated. We examined how touching an inanimate object—a teddy bear— might impact the effect of social exclusion on prosocial behavior. Across two studies, we found that socially excluded individuals who touched a teddy bear acted more prosocially as compared to socially excluded ind...

Animals often are prosocial, displaying behaviors that result in a benefit to one another [1-15] even in the absence of self-benefit [16-21] (but see [22-25]). Several factors have been proposed to modulate these behaviors, namely familiarity [6, 13, 18, 20] or display of seeking behavior [16, 21]. Rats have been recently shown to be prosocial under distress [17, 18] (but see [26-29]); however,...

Although the majority of our social interactions are with people we know, few studies have investigated the neural correlates of sharing valuable resources with familiar others. Using an ecologically valid research paradigm, this functional magnetic resonance imaging study examined the neural correlates of prosocial and selfish behavior in interactions with real-life friends and disliked peers ...

Reputation systems promote cooperation and deter antisocial behavior in groups. Little is known, however, about how and why people share reputational information. Here, we seek to establish the existence and dynamics of prosocial gossip, the sharing of negative evaluative information about a target in a way that protects others from antisocial or exploitative behavior. We present a model of pro...

The positive and negative influences of violent/action games, henceforth called ‘‘action games’’, remains controversial in the scholarly literature. Although debate continues whether action games influence aggressive behavior, little research has examined the influence of action games on civic engagement. The current study addresses this gap by examining the correlation between exposure to acti...